David Halberstam, who died Monday in an auto accident, was one of the greatest among a pivotal generation of reporters and writers who reshaped the intellectual and stylistic landscape of American journalism in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Unlike his close friends Gay Talese, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne and Hunter Thompson, Halberstam seldom is linked to the tendency -- it never really was a movement -- that Tom Wolfe first called the New Journalism. The influence of his work from that era, however, remains decisive.
Because so many other writers have followed the path he first marked out, it's difficult now to recall just how revolutionary his 1972 book "The Best and the Brightest" then seemed, with its synthesis of meticulous reporting, historical consciousness and narrative technique. Halberstam, moreover, brought these things to bear on a situation, Vietnam, which was then ongoing. It was the beginning of an entire genre of timely, narrative nonfiction books that we now take for granted, even as they enrich our public conversation.
Perhaps more important, Halberstam was the exemplar of a courageous intellectual approach to journalism that found its first clear public expression in a young combat correspondent's refusal to buy the government line on Vietnam. They were there; they trusted the evidence of their eyes and refused to look away, no matter how much pressure successive American administrations and the local military commanders brought to bear.
As he said in a widely discussed Commentary piece in 1965, "No one becomes a reporter to make friends, but neither is it pleasant in a situation like the war in Vietnam to find yourself completely at odds with the views of the highest officials of your country. The pessimism of the Saigon press corps was of the most reluctant kind: many of us came to love Vietnam, we saw our friends dying all around us, and we would have liked nothing better than to believe the war was going well and that it would eventually be won. But it was impossible for us to believe those things without denying the evidence of our own senses.... And so we had no alternative but to report the truth."
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Forged in civil rights era
